Adolf Hitler
Hitler needs no introduction, of course, except to those who have bought into the Holocaust-denial nonsense. Exactly that sort of insanity is at stake in McLuhan’s analysis of how World War II would likely have been avoidable if Hitler had only come along a decade or so later. While the invisibility of radio could successfully masquerade his obvious lunacy, television would have exposed that madness—as it did with Sen. Joseph McCarthy—much more quickly.
William Shakespeare
It is to the Bard that McLuhan hands one of the highest compliments. He singles out the Elizabethan dramatist’s famous works Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Troilus and Cressida in particular to illustrate his assertion that “a fairly complete handbook for studying the extensions of man could be made up from selections from Shakespeare.”
Al Capp
Al Capp is the creator of the long-running and immensely popular comic strip"Li’l Abner." He is portrayed by McLuhan as the iconic figure in the way that introduction of new media can negative impact messages which found tremendous success through previous media. In fact, he even singles out Capp as the “biggest casualty of the TV impact” upon the comics. Although that may seem like perhaps an overstatement, it is worth asking how many people today recognize either the name Al Capp or the title “Li’l Abner” which in its day was bigger than Calvin and Hobbes or Bloom County and nearly as omnipresent as Peanuts would later become.
E.E. Cummings
The poet as famous for idiosyncratic capitalization and word spacing as he is for the poems in which that idiosyncrasy is put on display is introduced into the text as an example of how the invention of a new medium can fundamentally change the perceptual condition of receiving the transmission of the message. McLuhan puts into context the fundamental impact of the invention of the typewriter on the creation of poetry with his poetic assertion that a “poet at the typewriter can do Njinsky leaps or Chaplin-like shuffles and wiggles.”
